JPMorgan Signed Deals to Charge the Data Middlemen

Between your bank account and the app that shows your balance sits a company you probably never chose and never paid. These companies are called data aggregators, and they're the plumbing. They hold the connection to your bank, pull the transactions, and pass them along to whichever app you actually signed up for. For years, the middlemen paid nothing to tap bank systems.

In 2025, JPMorgan signed deals to start charging them.

What JPMorgan Signed, and When

In September 2025, JPMorganChase and Plaid announced an extension to their data access agreement that, by the companies' own description, includes a pricing structure. American Banker reported the same day that the bank had reached a deal to charge Plaid for access to customer data.

Two months later, CNBC reported that the bank had signed updated contracts with the fintech middlemen making up more than 95% of the data pulls on its systems, including Plaid, Yodlee, Morningstar and Akoya. That figure comes from a JPMorgan spokesman, and it measures requests hitting JPMorgan's own systems rather than any share of the market or of customers. The contracts news is ten months old as I write this.

CNBC reported that after weeks of negotiation the bank agreed to lower pricing than it originally proposed, and the middlemen won concessions on how data requests get serviced, according to people with knowledge of the talks.

How much is it? People familiar with the matter told American Banker the fees are fractions of a cent per data pull, which is an unnamed-source figure rather than a number either company confirmed. The contracted pricing is undisclosed: CNBC reported that the bank and the fintech firms declined to disclose their contract details, including how much the middlemen agreed to pay and how long the deals last.

I want to be careful with the next sentence, because the tempting one is that this costs you money, and nothing in the reporting shows that happening. The closest thing is a forecast: Brian Shearer of the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator, who used to work at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), told CNBC he's worried the deals will create a barrier to entry for startups and ultimately raise costs for consumers. A Plaid spokeswoman told American Banker that Plaid would not pass the new fees on to its 7,000 fintech and bank clients. The companies' joint announcement said the agreement would not impact Plaid's current customer agreements and pricing. Both date from September 2025. Plaid's covers its clients, and the joint release covers Plaid's customer agreements and pricing at the time.

What Actually Changed

So the fee per data pull is tiny, and Plaid said it would not pass the fees on. What changed is the arrangement. At JPMorgan, the route between an account holder and their own bank records now runs through a private contract between the bank and a middleman, and the account holder isn't a party to it.

If you bank with JPMorgan, the thing being priced is a record of what you earned and what you spent. You can't see the number, you can't see when the contract runs out, and you have no seat at the renewal, however small the number turns out to be. I build a budgeting app, so whether to depend on that pipe is a question I've had to answer for myself, and it's the part I keep coming back to.

Where the Section 1033 Open Banking Rule Stands

There's supposed to be an authority that settles whether any of this is allowed. The CFPB finalized its Section 1033 rule in October 2024, and that rule generally prohibited banks and other covered providers from charging fees for the data access it required. In June 2026 I wrote about who owns your financial data, and the rule was already frozen by then.

It's still frozen. A federal court enjoined the CFPB from enforcing the rule while the agency runs a reconsideration process, and that remains the status today. In an August 2025 advance notice, a formal request for public comment, the CFPB reopened four questions, and one of them is how to assess fees charged for responding to a customer's request for their data. The rule that would have banned these charges is being rewritten by an agency that has put the ban itself back on the table.

The newest movement I can find is from August 2026, when the CFPB sent a new Section 1033 proposal to the White House budget office for review, according to a law firm tracking the docket. The substance isn't public yet. So the rule is neither enforced nor erased, and the pricing went ahead in that gap. Deals got signed while the question of whether they're permitted sat unanswered.

Where Trupocket Sits

Trupocket has no aggregator in it today. An optional bank connection through Plaid is on the roadmap, and you would switch it on yourself and could turn it off again. I went manual-first before anyone announced these fees, for other reasons. The upside now is narrow: the core of the app never needed the pipe, so it keeps working whatever the pipe ends up costing. If you want to see what that looks like day to day, a free Trupocket account works without connecting to anything.